Minority Literature and Collective Trauma: The Case of Slovene Triestine Literature

The study focuses on the relationship between minority literature and collective trauma. Drawing on the theory of trauma, psychoanalysis, memory studies, and literary representations of memory, we argue that the trauma resulting from the suppression of Slovene identity in Trieste during fascism is transmitted into literary discourse through two channels. Firstly, through the normative model of remembering the trauma in question – namely through literary works that can be described as fictions of memory. Secondly, we paid attention to the manifestations of trauma that (unconsciously) enter the narrative structure, regardless of the time and events, which are not necessarily tied to the period of fascism and to concrete events and places of memory. In this context, we illuminated the literary characters from the perspective of literary imagology (the I and the Other).